


Things You See In A Graveyard

by Krasimer



Series: Laughter In The Night [3]
Category: Naruto
Genre: But Hidan is a vampire, Canon-Typical Violence, Graveyard Guardians, Jashinism, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Reapers, The religion died out, Vampires, graveyards, so did the people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-10-02 18:44:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17269055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Krasimer/pseuds/Krasimer
Summary: He’d been raised a Jashinist, loyal and enduring, and had been raised to be a Reaper of souls. He had been working the job for the past one hundred and seventy-five years. Hidan had been around to see more wars than the average person could probably even dream of in a lifetime.But no.What got him, the weirdest thing he had seen, wassomeone in his graveyard.Every Reaper had a graveyard. A base of operations, where they opened a portal to the Beyond that they all served. Where souls were taken to be judged in the afterlife. Deidara had grilled him about it, Sasori and Itachi had asked him more than once to shut the fuck up about it.And someone was in it.





	Things You See In A Graveyard

There was something in his graveyard.

Hidan had been turned into a vampire at the age of twenty-two, was forever stuck being twenty-two, and had seen some _shit_ in his time. While he wasn’t the age of Sasori, who’d hit the sixth-century mark already, or Itachi, who made you feel every single one of his three hundred and eighty years when he looked at you, he was no rookie when it came to weirdness.

Deidara and Sasori getting along was up there, but even that didn’t make the top three.

He’d been raised a Jashinist, loyal and enduring, and had been raised to be a Reaper of souls. He had been working the job for the past one hundred and seventy-five years. Hidan had been around to see more wars than the average person could probably even dream of in a lifetime.

But no.

What got him, the weirdest thing he had seen, was _someone in his graveyard._

Every Reaper had a graveyard. A base of operations, where they opened a portal to the Beyond that they all served. Where souls were taken to be judged in the afterlife. Deidara had grilled him about it, Sasori and Itachi had asked him more than once to shut the fuck up about it.

_And someone was in it._

Creeping along, dodging between headstones. Hidan watched, torn between anger and confusion, as the figure he was watching came to a stop between two of the larger ones.

“What the _fuck_ do you think you’re _doing?_ ” he snarled as he stomped up to them.

Instead of the panicked face of a local teenager trying to spray paint some bullshit on a headstone, he came face-to-face with a being that would have looked human if his eyes hadn’t been so different. Or maybe if the stitches on his face weren’t so obvious.

Or maybe if the faces on his back, whispering ominously, weren’t so noticeable.

“My _job_ ,” the intruder growled back.

Hidan paused in the middle of the explosive bout of his temper that he could feel coming. Something about the way the being said it made the pause happen, effective and strange. “Your job?” he leaned back on the pole of his scythe, watching the intruder’s hands move deftly over the headstones, brushing away leaves and debris from the storm that had passed through the day before.

“Upkeep and remembrance.” Was the grunted reply.

“Upkeep—” Hidan blinked, then snorted out a laugh. “You’re a Graveyard Guardian.”

Those eyes, green and pink like a bizarro-world Christmas, flicked up to him again. No words this time, just an affirming grunt.

“By all means,” Hidan gestured at the graveyard. “The place probably needs it more than anything else. This was the Jashinist graveyard over a century back, but no one seems to remember that now. My family was the last group of Jashinists to be buried here. I collected their souls and sent them off to our Lord.”

“Kakuzu,” the Graveyard Guardian paused in his work, meeting Hidan’s eyes.

“What?”

“My name. I don’t like useless pleasantries, I don’t like wasting time. My name is Kakuzu and I am here to make sure the dead get honored correctly.” He ducked his head back down, cracked his neck with a vicious toss of his head in one direction, then brushed the dirt over the grave smooth again.

“Do the dead really give a fuck if their dirt is smooth?” Hidan rolled his eyes.

Kakuzu paused again, rolling his head so that he looked up at Hidan from an angle that looked like he had broken his neck. “Do you really give a fuck if your blankets are crooked in your bed?” he curled his hands into fists, resting them on his thighs. “Smooth isn’t so much the necessary thing as just…Care being put into keeping it clean. Neatened.”

“Yeah, okay,” Hidan shrugged. “You’re the only person I’ve ever seen in this graveyard besides myself. How’d you find it?”

The Graveyard Guardian paused again.

After a couple seconds of silence, he sat up straight, brushed his hands clean of grave dirt, then looked up at Hidan. “The souls you collect speak to me.” He said, his voice twisted with some emotion Hidan couldn’t identify.

“They speak—Oh, the faces.” Hidan glanced at Kakuzu’s shoulder, seeing the rounded edge of one of the faces on his back. “That’s fucking _cool_.” He dropped down to sit on the ground next to Kakuzu, carefully avoiding sitting on top of the grave. “So are you assigned a graveyard by the dead or by a higher power?” he settled his scythe down next to him, keeping one hand on it. “Do they talk to you constantly?”

“Near.” Kakuzu nodded. “And I am assigned by those in need. If there is only one person left to remember, there is a risk of them being forgotten entirely.”

Hidan chuckled, shaking his head. There wasn’t much of a risk of him forgetting the people he had been raised with. Almost two hundred years before, he had been the only surviving Jashinist, a plague of some sort wiping out their little settlement.

“I’m not going to forget them,” he said seriously.

“Who are they to you?” Kakuzu tilted his head towards Hidan, his odd eyes flicking up and down.

The grave they were sitting next to was a cousin of his, a young girl named Saia. She had been born to his aunt and when the plague had come, she had only been thirteen. “Family,” Hidan stared back at him. “All of them are family. I can tell you which one is what member.” He settled a hand on Saia’s tombstone. “One of my youngest cousins.”

“How did you survive a plague?” Kakuzu’s eyes narrowed. “They tend to wipe out entire small settlements.”

His heart clenched for a moment, a grief he had thought he wasn’t able to feel anymore dragging at his mind. “How did you—”

“They speak to me,” Kakuzu looked like he wanted to roll his eyes.

Or maybe punch Hidan.

He would have welcomed the fight, honestly. He had been separated from anyone else for so long. Sasori and Itachi and Sasuke were part of his Grouping, but he had no one else. Sasori had Deidara and Itachi had his little brother to annoy when he felt lonely. Hidan had a plot of land filled with graves of the people he had loved and a duty he had been left to do once his entire family had succumbed to something that hadn’t killed him – hadn’t been able to kill him. He might as well tell Kakuzu what had happened.

It wasn’t like Graveyard Guardians would tell anyone.

“I was turned,” Hidan tried to keep his tone casual, tried to make it sound like he didn’t really care. He wasn’t sure how well he managed it, based on Kakuzu’s narrowing eyes. “When they were upstairs, in the sunlight, dying from whatever sickness had gotten to them, I was in a basement, trying not to fall apart. Some bastard had turned me when I had gone out to get wood for the fires. My family didn’t know what to do with me, didn’t know how to feed me.” He shook his head. “I don’t blame them. When someone comes home injured and panicked, you don’t think to feed them blood.”

Kakuzu, to his surprise, looked almost…Concerned.

“But I had come home and sunlight suddenly hurt and I was already an albino, so my family didn’t think much about it. Sun had always been an issue for me. They just decided it had been made worse by the attack.” Hidan stared off into a blank space between graves. He wasn’t sure what was making him tell the Graveyard Guardian his story, but he was just going to let it happen. “So when they began dying, I couldn’t drag myself together enough to get upstairs and check on them. By the time I scraped enough of myself together and got out of the basement, they were all dead.”

Hesitantly, Kakuzu reached out a hand and put it on his shoulder.

He had told the story before, to Sasori and Itachi and Sasuke when the three of them had found him in the ruins of his family’s settlement. The details had been easy enough for them to see, with bodies everywhere.

“This is not going to be the best news,” Kakuzu’s voice was hard to focus on. “And I am not the best bearer of the news,” he reached over, his other hand going to Hidan’s wrist. The movement kept him from being able to lift his scythe. “But there wasn’t a plague. Your entire family was poisoned. Someone snuck into your settlement, someone new, someone they allowed to stay. By the time they discovered that there was danger among them, it was too late.”

Hidan froze. “What?”

“Your family didn’t die of some plague getting into the community,” Kakuzu shook his head, the pressure on Hidan’s right wrist increasing. It kept his hand plastered to the shaft of his scythe, giving him the comfort of his weapon being nearby but taking away his ability to wield it. “They were murdered.”

Hidan saw _red_.

When his vision cleared, he had managed to get up and away from Kakuzu, his fangs bared. His scythe still wasn’t in his hands, however.

The Graveyard Guardian had what looked like a mass of threads coming out of his wrist, holding the scythe down and away. With a shake of his head, almost hard enough to risk snapping his neck, Hidan snarled at him. “Give me that!”

“No,” Kakuzu stood up, angling the scythe behind his back. “Not if you’re going to go on a rampage with it. You’re angry, I understand that, but that does not mean you get to run off with a weapon that could easily kill anyone you come across. Hidan,” he took a step forward. “Tell me, do you remember any new person? You said you would remember the people in this graveyard – do you remember the newcomer?”

Shaking his head again, trying to clear his thoughts enough, Hidan squeezed his eyes shut. Saia had been the one to tell him about the newcomer, shortly before his father had ordered him to grab more wood for the fire. “He had been put up in one of the empty houses – One of my cousins had gotten married and his wife wanted to travel the world. They went. Their house was empty.” He clapped his hands over his eyes, ignoring the urge to claw at the skin beneath his fingers. “I heard his name, just once, and then I was off to get wood for the fires.” When he had come back, he had been a bit preoccupied with the fact that his throat had been nearly ripped out and his veins were on fire.

Hidan growled, pushing through his memories.

He and Kakuzu spoke at the same time.

“Madara,” the word was spoken quietly, with resignation from Kakuzu and fury from Hidan.

Kakuzu curled both of his hands around Hidan’s scythe, his eyes falling to a half-closed state. Hidan could feel the bond of the Grouping flare, activated by something other than his own will. “What the _fuck_ —”

“You need someone to be here with you,” Kakuzu stepped closer to him, still not handing back his weapon. “Your job is on hold, there are others who can do the same work at the moment. Your family is screaming from the afterlife, trying to figure out how to contact you directly. Your Grouping needs to know you’ve been emotionally compromised.” He hefted the scythe above his head and pitched it as hard as he could throw it. It landed on top of the mausoleum that stood nearby, the resting places of Hidan’s parents and grandparents.

Off in the distance, he could hear footsteps. Hidan turned to look in that direction.

When he turned back, Kakuzu had disappeared.

Of course.

Graveyard Guardians were magic users. Kakuzu had probably plucked at the Grouping bond and made it feel like Hidan had requested the presence of the others. Once it was certain that the others would show up, he had probably teleported to somewhere else.

Strangely, Hidan thought as Itachi and Sasuke stepped out of the woods, he hoped Kakuzu would come back.

**Author's Note:**

> Did you think I wasn't going to branch out to see where the rest of everyone was?


End file.
